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Al's favorite color. (Getty Images)

I guess that check from Al Jazeera must have cleared, because Al Gore is in the news with another major score.

Two weeks after pulling down a reported $100 million from the sale of Current TV to the Qatar-based news network, the man so many love to hate is at it again, this time by exercising options entitling him to buy 59,000 Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) shares for the excellent price of $7.475 each.

So Gore has just spent a little over $440,000 to acquire stock worth nearly $30 million as of Thursday’s close. And what did he do for all that money? Attended a board meeting a few times a year for the last decade. Had Steve Jobs’ back when it counted. That’s all. Not bad for someone who didn’t invent the Internet.

Do you think this stinks? Some hereditary politician making out like a real tycoon after rubbing shoulders with the hippie high-tech elites? Realizing more wealth in a single day than the average Chinese assembler of iPhones will earn in 100 lifetimes? Does it make you angry to see this sanctimonious do-gooder get filthy rich?

If so, you’re exactly the person I’m trying to reach.

You see, Gore earned those millions because he’s very talented. Because the government is not the inferiority complex imagined by the people who would dismantle it. In fact, it’s filled with talented professionals like Al Gore. People at the top of their fields. Astronauts and epidemiologists. Curators and commandos.

What makes Al Gore talented? Well, the cream of Silicon Valley repeatedly sought his counsel. And Gore didn’t just show up to get paid. By all accounts, he rolled up his sleeves and dove into business strategy the way he used to geek out on the minutiae of public policy.

And guess what? He made his millions fair and square—which is to say as fairly as the next guy. He was brought onto Apple’s board by Steve Jobs—the man who gave Gore the options to buy the stock at its price at the time, the same man who then turned that piffle into a vast fortune.

Gore was there for the run from $7 a share to $700 a share—in fact those options had to be exercised in March by the 10th anniversary of his arrival.

And Jobs loved the guy, was inspired by him. Urged him to run for president long after the political establishment and Gore himself had written off his chances. “We have dug ourselves into a 20-foot hole, and we need somebody who knows how to build a ladder. Al's the guy," Jobs told Time magazine in 2007. "Like many others, I have tried my best to convince him.”

Gore didn’t just make the guy who boosted the share price a hundred-fold comfortable. He handled tricky assignments like investigating the backdating of executive options, so Jobs could concentrate on iThings.

And while doing that he found the time to push global warming way up the political agenda, advise Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and join Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist. And, of course, to turn his little cable TV channel into a $100 million payday.

So yeah, Al Gore knows something about capitalism.

You’d think the notion that public servants aren’t good managers would have died the night a certain community organizer from Chicago checkmated a certified business genius from Boston. But no, the conceit is still around. It doesn’t seem to matter that community organizing, and politics in general, is perhaps more of a managerial proving ground than buying out companies and leveraging them out of existence.